Electromagnetic interference occurring in a receiver modifies or disrupts a target electromagnetic signal in the receiver, resulting in degradation of the target signal. The interference may be natural or man-made. Natural electromagnetic interference sources include thermal noise sources, pulses emitted by lightning, astronomical sources, etc. Man-made electromagnetic interference sources may be unintentional sources, such as interference generated by industrial processes and household appliances, or intentional sources, such as jammers designed to reduce the effectiveness of a system, such as a cell phone system or a radar jammer system.
Such interference can seriously degrade the performance of a system that is configured to receive particular signals. For example, for a radar or sonar system, interference can result in a failure to detect an imminent threat. For navigation and position receivers, interference can result in loss of accuracy or outright jamming. For communication systems, interference can increase the bit error rate.
Work on mitigating electromagnetic interference dates back to the earliest days of radio. Until approximately 1950, the majority of the work consisted of means and techniques for minimizing natural and mutual interference. Post 1950, efforts began in earnest on mitigating the effect of purposeful, man-made interference.
Known techniques and systems for mitigating interference typically use the ergodic, or statistical, properties of the interference with respect to the desired signal to identify the interference and the desired signal and to create a weighting function that optimizes a cost function. Separating the signal from the interference in this manner requires averaging the signal over a time period in order to estimate signal statistics. The averaging time period is long relative to the reciprocal bandwidth of the desired signal and the interference signal. Requiring the summation over a relatively long time period assumes that the statistics of both the interference and the desired signal are stationary for the time period, which is not always a valid assumption and can lead to undesirable mitigation results.
Accordingly, a need exists for a method and system for mitigating interference that overcome the shortcomings of known systems and methods.